Critical Essay by Marilyn Gaull

E. E. Cummings, particularly in The Enormous Room, assumed the multiple task of demonstrating not only the discrepancy between language and experience but also the corrosive effects of this discrepancy on the human psyche, and, perhaps his most significant achievement, offered a means for overcoming it in the creation of new relationships between language and experience. (p. 646)

[Principles] for restoring value to a benumbed and misleading language were displayed by Cummings throughout his work. His characteristic device was the manipulation of contexts, associating symbols with their functional referents rather than traditional ones. Such a device, however, in the spare and unelaborated idiom of his poetry was actually a source of confusion…. In the poetry … Cummings' assault on the traditional values of words appears to be little more than evocative eccentricity. Within the more flexible bounds of prose, however...